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6

A few days later, I was deeply touched to come home about 9:45 p.m. after having spent the early evening with Jim Chambers and D.P. Orcutt, and find that Rog had actually been crying to see his "little Daddy" as he sometimes referred to me and had refused to go to sleep until I got home although he finally dropped off in spite of himself. As I look back upon this period, I have a guilty feeling over not having spent more time with the children but my job was getting more and more demanding and, of course, my success in it meant a great deal to all of us.
The next night was Saturday and Willie and I and Barbara and Charlie Reed went to the Lawrence Hotel for "night life." (We still use that term.) We started in the Commodore Perry Room, the plush new red, white, blue and gold bar off the lobby that was probably the ritziest place in town. We had a drink and then I had the brilliant idea of phoning Jim Hyde of Ingersoll-Rand in his room and inviting him down to join us. He was there and soon came down, spending the rest of the evening with us. We wound up in the basement dancing. As I expected, Jim charmed both Willie and Barbara with his quiet, gentlemanly ways and deep, refined voice. And when he told a story, there was always something to it. Jim was in engineering and had traveled a lot, from which he'd extracted many experiences such as his visits to a Tampico bar featuring a tenor with two six-shooters who stood on the bar while singing, an orchestra in Denmark that would play any one of 1,100 numbers on request, and Captain Lord and the mystery room on the CONSTITUTION (which at this point in time, is a mystery to me). I note in my diary regarding this occasion that I saw Sue Dieffendorf dancing and "somehow the old charm was gone--the 'vision in white satin' was now just an ordinarily attractive girl again and a trifle bowlegged at that." Again, at this point in time, as they said so often in the Watergate hearings, I can't remember the once lovely Sue at all.
And now, to show what I sometimes did for the sake of my job, and which probably sounds very foolish indeed, after we got home at 12:30 a.m. from the above outing, I started out again for a two-hour session at the Tanner Club with Ralph Ballard and Chuck Depew, two of the Illinois Central inspectors, because Ballard had been begging me for six months to go there some Saturday night. It proved to be a milling, heavy drinking, loud talking, coarse-acting crowd of working people that left me pretty cold and made me appreciate even more keenly, my regular friends and the kind of time I'd had at the Lawrence earlier in the evening.
At this time, Willie belonged to the College Women's Club, so one evening while she was attending one of their dinners, I took Bab to a Sunday School pageant rehearsal and then Rog and I killed an hour together looking into windows on State Street and having ice cream at Pulakos. He was always the object of all eyes and I got a great kick out of having him with me.